MaximumLinux.org: Delphi 6/Kylix Review

[ Thanks to Mark for this link. ]

With a few exceptions, says this review, Kylix is everything a Delphi developer could want, providing anyone with skill in the former a remarkably easy start in the latter. Unfortunately, there are also a few missing components.

"...The downside is that Kylix does not have all the features that are availble to Delphi 6. The largest is the web services.

Delphi 6 is currently shipping with web services. Web services is what MS is pushing in .NET for its distributed achitecture. Remote Services and procedure calls are handled via XML, HTTP and SOAP. Delphi has an excellent set of tools for building server side tools and also for building clients that use web services. (Borland had an excellent demo where an app was built from scratch that had an edit box (text box for the MS developers), a button and another edit box. Upon hitting the button, the application takes the text in the first edit box, submits it to the "babbelfish" web service and then gets the translation back from the service and sticks it in the second edit box. It took about 5 minutes to build this application. Delphi actually builds the whole interface for your client based on the WSDL file available.)

Unfortunately, Kylix does not have this in the current shipping version. It seems that, to insure the application would ship in a decent time period, Klix hit a feature freeze and web services didn't make it. Borland did not put it in stone, but they said it MAY be added in a future patch. This is one of the components that will not compile correctly from Delphi to Kylix."

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